Message from the President September.2023

The word "recycle" first appeared in the Annual Report on the Environment published by the Ministry of the Environment in 1980. At that time it was called the Environment Agency. Subsequently, the phrase "from 1R (Recycle) to 3R (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle)" appeared in the Circular Economy Vision proposed by the Fundamental Problem Joint Sub-committee on formed by the Earth Environment Committee of the Industrial Structure Council and the Waste and Recycling Committee in 1999, and eventually, the 3R concept became a slogan for the reduction and recycling of waste.

In addition, due to the Act on Promoting Green Purchasing enacted as a part of the Act on the Promotion of Effective Utilization of Resources enforced in 2001, it became mandatory for both companies and consumers to procure and purchase products and services that contribute to reducing environmental load. Companies have promoted environmentally conscious design (3R+Renewable) in order to provide environmentally friendly products and services. We also adopted internal training programs in line with this design thinking, and by doing so, our engineers responded to client needs quickly.

As this development shows, the creation of a recycling-oriented society accelerated in earnest in and after around 2001 in Japan.

Today, countries, companies and people are continuously working on the development of recycling technologies and researching reusable materials to reduce environmental load and use limited resources effectively, with a view toward the realization of a sustainable society. Recycling is closely related to the 12th theme of SDGs, responsible consumption and production. In particular, recycling initiatives implemented by the automobile industry have drawn attention due to the large number of automobiles that it produces and the large amount of fossil fuel consumed by the users of their products.

In July 2003, the European Commission announced a draft regulation with an eye toward looking at the entire process of vehicle design, production and end-of-life treatment to improve automobile recyclability. The regulation mainly proposed stricter rules to promote vehicle design that accelerates the reuse and recycling of components and obligates manufacturers to increase their use of recycled plastics to more than 25% of the plastics used in the production of new cars (25% of the recycled plastics shall be recycled from discarded cars). Therefore, it is expected that automobile producers around the world, believing that their survival depends on their compliance with rules such as these, will accelerate their resource recycling initiatives going forward.

As a group of professional engineers, our duty is to solve social issues jointly with clients by facilitating the development tasks of clients. We have been engaged in the design and development tasks of many companies —a total of more than 4,000 clients over the many years we have been operating. As such, I am confident that, by collecting our engineers' technological expertise and wisdom, we will be able to contribute to the realization of a future society in which every product and service is recycled and reused.